The 1989 edition of Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language gives the following definitions of the noun “desert.” “1. a region so arid that it supports only sparse and widely spaced vegetation, or no vegetation at all. 2. any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil.”
Though Utah is by no means a single homogeneous place, it can be roughly divided into two ecoregions, as categorized by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, (though “pockets of particular ecoregions exists in other areas and areas of transition from one region to the next is not strictly defined”) of Western Interior Basins and Ranges and Western Cordillera. The Western Interior Basins and Ranges consists of “pinyon-juniper, with sagebrush at lower elevations, oak and conifer higher,” while the Western Cordillera consists of “mixed conifer forest (Subalpine Fir, Douglas-fir, Ponderosa Pine) with oak and pinyon-juniper southwards at lower elevations.” The Western Cordillera runs roughly north-south from the border of southeast Idaho and northern Utah to the southwestern corner of Utah (with an anomalous east-west range stretching across the northeastern corner of Utah paralleling the Wyoming border).
Besides this geological upheaval—as if you could discount it after you’ve seen it—the state mostly consists of the Western Interior Basins and Ranges ecoregion. Though such categorization is by no means exhaustive, a focus on the ecoregion—which is simply an “ecologically distinctive area”—may help us define the problem of life in Utah. Not in the sense that there is something inherently troubled about life along the Wasatch Front, but in the broadest sense in which any situation, any facet of life, can be described as a problem. To fully confront our lived reality, we must first understand where we live—the context of our problem. And so the specific ecoregion puts in perspective the desert-like nature of this landscape. This ecoregion isn’t simply dotted around Utah’s landscape, it encompasses it and so, consequently, nearly the entire state of Utah is defined by plants that make do with very little.
But what happens when slowly (or sometimes very quickly) a landscape defined by scarcity is transformed to a landscape defined by a modern people who are not well-acquainted with scarcity?
In this vein, Wendell Berry writes in his essay “Two Minds” that “we live in two landscapes, one superimposed upon the other.” He continues that “First there is the cultural landscape made up of our own knowledge of where we are, of landmarks and memories, of patterns of use and travel, of remindings and meanings. The cultural landscape, among other things, is a pattern of exchanges of work, goods, and comforts among neighbors. It is the country we have in mind.” He then goes on to speak of the “actual landscape” as something we “can never fully know, which is always going to be in some degree a mystery, from time to time surprising us.” But the problem begins, Berry contends, when these landscapes “become too different.” And the results, though sad, will be intuitive enough— “we will make practical errors that will be destructive of the actual landscape or of ourselves or both.” Yet the problems don’t end at the practical destruction of the landscape for, Berry writes, “to be disconnected from any actual landscape is to be, in the practical or economic sense, without a home. To have no country carefully and practically in mind is to be without a culture.”
To be living in the desert without acknowledging scarcity or living in such a way as to respect the fragility of life is to not only heap insult upon our injurious lifestyle superimposed on the desert—it is to be homeless and culture-less.
Furthermore, though it surely helps to place limits on our own consumption, Utah’s rapid population growth creates another problem. How does one live in a desert— “an area where [it used to be that] few forms of life [could] exist”—that now has many forms of life on it? Or to put it simply, how do you live in an overpopulated desert (perhaps a problem less for Utah at large, than in some specific areas)? There may be landscapes that hide overpopulation better, but the flat and seemingly endless expanses of desert, scrub, and juniper that are only occasionally interrupted by jagged orogenies are not one of them. Part of the mystique of deserts is the primal intuition that some sort of solitude is reachable there, and in that nearly tangible solitude some sort of transformational wisdom lies. But solitude and transformational wisdom are hard to come within earshot of the roar of I-15 and within the viewshed of the endless monoculture of single-family homes.
It’s difficult these days to have a conversation about overpopulation, but I think that just may be one of the Utah’s fastest-growing problems. I can anticipate many would take issue with that statement, and I don’t want some to assume that belief stems from some barely disguised misanthropy. I generally like 70-80% of the people around me at any given time (though that percentage does drop on bad days) and I want everyone born on this planet to have the chance for a good and fulfilling life (a hope shared by many and one that probably is better categorized religiously in terms of the Bodhisattvas vow— “there are innumerable sentient beings, I vow to save them all”) but my concern doesn't end there. I'm also deeply concerned about the quality of life (or even the mere existence) of those living things we share this space with, and the quality of life we have while we share it.
I'm a passionate birder and one of the most sobering facts I have learned in the past few years is that North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970. Of course not all of this is because the human population has continued to grow, there are massive problems in our urban planning (namely the lack of density), but part of it is. It would be negligent for us to engage a kind of willful blindness about that fact. There are finite resources on this planet, and yes, wonderfully brilliant and ingenious people that can help us use those finite resources better and more efficiently, but I think it's essentially a neoliberal fantasy that the same processes that led us to rape and pillage the land will also (someday) lead us to the sunny uplands where at last we will have enough and to spare, a state which will finally give us the breathing room to set aside lands for wildlife, use less, etc. and all sorts of economically unsound but ecologically necessary things.
Soberingly, I’ve come to believe that we can’t simply expect to spend and research our way out of our present crisis—the crisis about who we are, because we know longer really know where we are. We must learn to live within limits. That is not to say scientific research isn't valuable, but it won't save us from the most difficult part of what it means to live with scarcity—and that is to sanctify this scarcity, if you will, with respect, caution, and affection towards what we have. Part of this sort of respect will be to make personal decisions about the carrying capacity of our small corner of the earth—and not after having removed all other living things from the calculation—and to make family planning decision based on those deliberations. Though the carrying capacity of Utah, and any place in the world, need not be static, with human ingenuity we can shrink our collective footprint (carbon, ecological, etc.), we must also weigh how our population and its rate of growth will impact the other living things we share this space with. So far, we haven't really been looking at this problem squarely. We've mostly reduced it to a conversation about how many humans the earth can support instead of how many humans the earth can support while continuing to support the dense weave of life that make this world a miracle. But one day perhaps, when we face this problem squarely, we will have a chance to redeem the desert—and not just in our beautifully necessary but insufficient public lands—all around us. And at that point we may choose to build a society at blessed peace with scarcity and then, if given enough time, we may yet attain an original relation to this place, our home.